While industries across the board fell prey to the COVID-19, the tech space saw exponential growth and development. Like what Helen’s face did to the Greek ships, the novel coronavirus saw the launching of thousands of apps, innovations, and updates to existing tech. “This has been a year of thinking on our feet.
During the lockdown when the stores were shut, on vijaysales.com we started accepting partial payments so that customers didn’t have to shell out the entire cost of the product and still not know when the product will be delivered,” says Karan Gupta, Director, Vijay Sales, noting, “This helped us increase our dotcom sales and also helped customers to book fast-selling products.” Indeed, the consumer durable industry picked up post the lockdown, and Vijay Sales experienced a significant growth in its digital and accessories business due to work-and-school-fromhome scene.
This situation also set the stage for its recent partnership with Made in India for the brand: Noise. The company founded in 2017, has been catering to the growing demands of ear wear and smart devices in India, and has emerged as the market leader in both the audio and the smart wearable categories, being listed as a top brand on Amazon and Flipkart.
This story of exponential growth was repeated across software platforms. Khabri, a digital audio platform which provides content in Hindi (with limited content in Bhojpuri and Bengali), ranging from news to current events, info-and-entertainment, with the bytes provided by users on the ground for listeners without access to the same in their own vernacular, saw enormous growth this year, despite having launched back in 2017.
Dushyantt Kohli, COO, Khabri, informs that in the pandemic, the company launched a robust creator program on Khabri Studio App for influencers to make content to be published on Khabri platform. “Additionally, we have launched a unique concept — ‘Gigs’ on Khabri Studio which enables even a new creator to earn money from day one of joining the platform based on the merit of the content created by him/her, helping them financially.
Gigs constantly expire and new ones replace them daily, making the initial days of a creator journey more rewarding thus helping them grow to Silver level (Organic earning starts at silver level) where they can get tangible earnings from their content month over month. In the lockdown, Khabri also launched #VoiceOfBlind for the blind community of India. We ran a dedicated helpline for 90 days and helped over 30,000 visually impaired folk in need,” says Kohli.
As a part of this initiative, to keep the community motivated, Khabri started a celebrity live show and got 12 celebrities, including politicians, Bollywood, sports, administrative services, music and arts, like Manoj Tiwari, Aakash Chopra, Durga Shakti, Rajpal Yadav to name a few. It’s not just fun and games, however. Oncam, an international video software and hardware security company saw demand for its products sky rocket. Abhishek Kumar, Regional Director, Oncam, says “Due to the pandemic, the need of surveillance has become the need of the hour with public places having to keep a track on the activities going on.
Oncam, which specialises in single 360 degree fisheye camera and video surveillance technology has introduced C12 indoor and outdoor camera with industry leading frame rates and advanced light management technology. Our product innovations in C12 revolve around solving our customers’ need of realtime high megapixel surveillance of large areas with an aim to achieve total situational awareness without substantially increasing storage requirements and costs.” In this brave new world then, remember someone is always watching.